Resisting Big Tech

Upriver Press Book Review

The Tech Coup

By Marietje Schaake

Princeton University Press, 2024

Many people with a libertarian mindset fear that the government will suppress or eliminate personal freedoms. But what if, paradoxically, laissez-faire governments allow powerful, monopolistic Big Tech companies to reduce citizens’ freedoms?

That is Marietje Schaake’s concern.

“The word coup may not quite cover the full extent of the takeover and remaking of the US government that is happening,” writes Marietje Schaake, who is the international director of policy at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center. “The merger between American politics and narrow business interests completely sidesteps the rule of law, in ways that will radically change the United States and the world for decades to come” (p. 7).

Schaake’s argument, in a nutshell, is that Big Tech companies have become so powerful that they are now overlords of our private lives, the financial system, and many government functions. With trillions of dollars in market value, the companies have gained extreme lobbying power, which they use to avoid public accountability. To the extent that the government cedes public functions to corporate behemoths, citizens are marginalized from self-governance as designed by the US Constitution.

“The great outsourcing of government is fundamentally rewriting the social contract between the democratic state and its citizens,” she writes (p. 101).

Ironically, says Schaake, taxpayers provide a major source of funding for the “coup.” Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, the AI companies, and Google have collectively received hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded government contracts in recent years (p. 245). Winning government contracts is not a problem per se, says Schaake; however, she argues that the companies benefit from public funding while resisting public accountability. They use intellectual property laws and their lobbying powers to avoid transparency and taxes.

The book presents numerous examples of how lenient governance has permitted Big Tech companies to gain unfathomable power over public infrastructure and services, all without any meaningful accountability. For example, consider that Elon Musk—an immigrant who can’t be elected to public office—owns thousands of Starlink satellites that form a global communications infrastructure. Schaake documents how Musk offered twenty thousand Starlink internet terminals to Ukraine after Russia invaded the country, giving him significant leverage in the outcome of the war. When he threatened to turn off Ukraine’s services, the US covered part of the cost to keep the system there working.

“In effect, what had seemed like a goodwill gesture from Musk was instead attempting to turn the US government—and all of Ukraine—into a major Starlink customer,” writes Schaake about Musk’s extraordinary power (p. 142).

Schaake also covers how social media companies use Section 230 of the US Code to avoid responsibility for the damaging effects of their media products. She describes the rapid but largely unregulated integration of private cryptocurrencies in our financial systems, even though these so-called “currencies” are highly speculative, and widely used for influence peddling and bribery, tax evasion, illegal arms sales, and drug trafficking. Moreover, she documents how governments are allowing AI companies—and paying them—to centralize data about nearly every aspect of our lives, including our banking and tax records, our locations, our communications, and our relational connections.

“The world over, technology has become a critical pillar in the high-stakes game of modern geopolitics—and democracies are losing,” writes Schaake. “Digitization has empowered authoritarian regimes (e.g., China), while democratic societies misguidedly continue to trust that free markets will lead to free societies” (p. 221).

Schaake is far from being a communist who wants the government to take over the private sector. She favors free markets. She disdains communist China’s use of technology to control people. However, her argument is that the vast but opaque power of Big Tech companies, who operate products and services for billions of users around the world, is seriously eroding citizens’ right to constitutional self-governance in a free society. Thus, she says we need to reform policy in ways that restore the power of citizens.

The last chapter of The Tech Coup presents specific policy changes that would, in her view, properly hold the Big Tech companies accountable. “Any law that applies to governmental organizations to maintain transparency and accountability should be applied equally to technology companies that execute tasks on behalf of the government,” she writes (p. 243). In other words, if the companies want to benefit from taxpayer funding, they should be accountable to the taxpayers.

In the meantime, citizens have no choice but to trust the companies to self-regulate. Basing her position on recent evidence, Schaake is not optimistic about self-regulation.

“Self-regulation in the tech industry should not be a substitute for government oversight, and lawmakers’ policy views should not be steered by corporate lobbyists but by a deep commitment to the public interest,” she writes. “According to an old Dutch saying, ‘The butcher should not test his own meat,’ which is the equivalent of saying, ‘You should not grade your own homework’” (p. 185).

The Tech Coup is an important book for our times, helping us think about the massive and rapid technological changes that are occurring around the world.

Quote to Ponder

“Many people rightly feel uncomfortable about being under constant surveillance while they are online. In the US and Europe, massive private sector tech companies do the surveillance. This is often called surveillance capitalism.” — Chris Savage, media and technology lawyer, in Overcoming Information Chaos (Upriver Press, 2025)

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